


Bitten

by SomewhereApart



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Unfinished
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 19:09:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16898292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomewhereApart/pseuds/SomewhereApart
Summary: Marian’s return brings with it an unintended passenger that puts Roland’s life in danger.





	1. Chapter 1

Robin has Marian clutched against him, his heart hammering, Roland cradled between them. He cannot believe she’s here, cannot believe she’s back. He knows, logically he knows, that Regina is here and she can see all this, and he knows it will hurt her, but at this exact moment he cannot bring himself to care. She cannot begrudge him a reunion with the wife he thought long-dead.

He has no idea how this is happening, but he is grateful, so grateful, and -

Roland’s piercing cry interrupts his thoughts, and the boy rears in their arms, then lets out a pained wail.

Something is wrong.

Robin sets the boy on his feet, crouches down in front of him, and Roland’s first cries were just the beginning, just a warning. His eyes are anguished, his mouth open in the kind of painless wail so rarely seen outside of squalling babes, and he sucks in a huge breath and lets out an ungodly howl of pain. He holds his hand out, and Robin nearly chokes with terror.

Just below his thumb the skin is welted and broken, a deep purple rimmed in sickly green, and Robin can see a streak of purple chasing up his skin, under his sleeve.

It’s a spider bite, and one of the most deadly in all of the Enchanted Forest. The sapphire arrow. Such an innocuous sounding name, for a spider that brings such agony, and death within a day. They’d called it the widowmaker - it seemed more appropriate.

They don’t exist in this land, a happy change, but one is here and it has claimed his son, and Robin is frozen in fear. Marian has crouched next to him, clapped her hands over her mouth, eyes already wet, shaking her head back and forth, back and forth.

And then there’s a third figure next to them, and it’s Regina, Robin realizes. She nearly skids in her haste to drop at Roland’s side, and her eyes are wet, too, but he knows it’s not for the same reason.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, gaze flicking along the three of them. Marian orders her to keep away from their son, but Regina ignores her, looks to Robin, and he shoves Roland’s hand in her direction and watches her face fall. She knows exactly what this is.

She turns Roland to face her, pushing at his coat, shoving it hastily to the ground and pushing up his sleeve. The purple streak has snaked all the way up to his elbow. “Where were you?” she asks Marian, frantically, and he looks to his wife and sees her eyes harden. Flinty and dangerous, a look unfamiliar on her beautiful face.

“Your dungeons,” she bites, nearly growls, and that can’t be. Robin is unsure exactly where Emma ended up in time, but he knows that Marian was never in the Queen’s clutches.

Regina yanks Roland’s shirt over his head, and Robin can see the purple as it crawls up his bicep. How is it spreading so fast? It should take hours.

Regina turns her head just enough to sneer, “Looks like you brought something else back after all, Miss Swan,” and Robin spares a glance for Emma, who is watching in horror as poison claims his child, his beautiful child.

Regina wastes no more time, barking, “Someone find the spider,” and there’s commotion all around them, but all Robin hears is the buzzing in his ears and Roland’s miserable cries. There are antidotes to slow the poison, he knows, but not a single one that he can think of contains ingredients only from this world. He is going to lose his boy, his precious boy, and he looks at Marian and feels an unfair curl of resentment. He’s glad to see her, yes, and he’d have done anything to have her back once, yes, but he will not - would never - trade her life for Roland’s. If she brought this creature back with her…

Regina is shushing Roland, trying to soothe his cries, all gentle hands on his face and soft smiles. Ever the mother, and Roland’s own mother watches on with a scowl of confusion. The boy’s cries barely weaken, but he’s looking at her, at least, and that seems to be all she requires. “Roland,” she says softly, and Robin can hear the undercurrent of panic in her voice. “I need to help you, but it might be scary, and it’s going to hurt, okay?”

His boy nods, bravely, and Regina tugs him closer, presses a kiss to his brow, and then separates, takes a deep breath and plunges her hand into his chest cavity.

Robin startles and Marian lets out a horrified scream. As Regina pulls their son’s bright, beating heart from his chest, Marian wraps her arms around him protectively.

“What have you done, you monster?!” Marian screams at her, but Regina pays her no mind, simply looks at Robin and explains.

“If the poison reaches his heart…” She trails off, because they both know the answer: it will stop.

Robin lets out a relieved breath, feels like every muscle in his body has gone liquid.

She’s bought them time. She’s saved him from certain death.

“Thank you,” he breathes, and Marian is looking at him like he is deranged.

“Thank you?!” she starts in on him, and Robin is harsher than he means to be when he cuts her off.

“Yes!” he shouts. “He’s alive, and now he’ll stay that way, thanks to her!”

“Not forever,” Regina utters quietly next to him, and he looks at her, at his son’s small, strong heart beating in her palm. “The poison,” she says, looking pointedly at Roland’s hand. Robin hasn’t looked at it in minutes, and when he does, his stomach turns. He can see clear down to the bone of his boy’s thumb, and the broken skin has spread up to his wrist. His whole hand is swollen and going green. The poison is enough to kill him, he realizes, heart or no. It will consume the boy, eat him alive, and Robin is suddenly wondering if the heart attack would be a less cruel fate.

Marian looks stricken, hugs Roland tighter, buries her nose in his hair and Robin quells the urge to yank him back away from her. This is not her fault, he reminds himself. She’s done nothing on purpose.

Regina looks at Emma again, and orders once more for them to find the dreaded thing. “I can cure him, but I do not have enough for the rest of you. Find it,” he gaze flicks to Snow, “Destroy it.” And then the baby in her arms, “And protect the children - they fall faster.”

And then, Robin sees smoke, swirling and purple and all-consuming.


	2. Chapter 2

When it clears, they are alone, and Granny’s has been replaced by a room that he at first mistakes for Regina’s office, but then he realizes something isn’t right. There are no windows. The walls are patterned the same, and there’s a ghostly white apple tree, and mirrors everywhere, but no windows.

In the time it’s taken him to observe their surroundings, Regina has walked to a corner, settled Roland’s precious heart on a table there, and is on her way back to them.

“Where are we?” he asks, clutching his still-screaming son to his chest, and watching as Regina drags a sofa into the middle of the room with a simple flick of her wrist. She reaches for Roland, and Robin lets her take him. He’ll let her do anything she pleases so long as she cures his boy.

She sets him gingerly on the sofa, and strokes a hand through his hair, answering, “My vault.”

It’s a far cry from the one they’d walked through in her old castle, that’s for sure.

“Where’s Marian?” he asks, because it has not escaped his notice that he and Roland have been transported here and his newly returned wife has not. The withering look she gives him makes him wish he hadn’t asked.

“She’s at Granny’s. She doesn’t trust me; you think I’d allow her **here**?” Her voice is sharp, impersonal. The Queen now, not Regina.

And he wants Regina back, because his boy is still crying, poison eating its way through his tiny body, and he knows her presence will be a comfort to both of them. So he apologizes.

“I’m sorry, I –” he watches as she casts something, a shimmering circle ringing the floor around Roland, and he finds himself stepping jerkily within its bounds, and not of his own volition. “I just know she’ll be worried. But she doesn’t belong here, you’re right.”

He hopes it mollifies, but it just makes her sneer. “No. She doesn’t,” Regina says and he knows she’s speaking of more than her vault.

“What’s this?” he asks, pointing to the circle.

“If that thing is on either of you, I don’t want it hiding away in here.” She’s walking away from him, heading towards what he realizes is a door. “If it hits the circle, it’ll die.” She glances back as she turns the handle. “Check him, and check yourself.”

And then she opens the door, and beyond it there is only darkness for a moment. Then light blooms beyond, and he can see a dark crypt, nooks and shelves full of magical objects. That’s more like it, he thinks, as he watches her step into her element.

He sets about following her orders, sitting next to Roland on the sofa and searching for the spider. He runs his fingers through his son’s hair, strips him down to the skin and turns out his pockets, flips the fabric inside out, shakes it violently, but there’s nothing. He redresses the boy, realizes his shirt and coat are still back at the diner, they had not made the trip here with them.

He shrugs out of his own coat and shakes it, careful to keep within the bounds of the circle she’s cast. It has too many pockets for his comfort, so he drops it to the ground and makes quick work of unbuttoning his shirt, examining every inch swiftly, and he’s about to drape it around Roland when he hears Regina order sharply, “Stop!” And then a quieter, almost fearful, “Don’t move.”

Robin freezes, a nervous bloom of sweat spreading over his skin.

There is only one reason he can think of that she’d give him that particular warning.

The spider is here. On him.

He feels her step up carefully behind him, close enough that even over Roland’s continued cries, he can hear her absently muttering, **don’t move, don’t move, stay still…** And then something touches the skin on the back of his neck, something cold and solid and he feels a pinch, and startles. He’s been bitten, he’s sure of it, but there’s no following agony, nothing worthy of the cries Roland had let out, and he hears Regina’s “Got it,” from behind him and spins, clapping a hand against the back of his neck.

“I felt something,” he tells her frantically, and she grimaces sympathetically.

“I think I pinched you with the cap,” she explains, adding, “Sorry,” and then, “Believe me, if it was this guy, you’d know.”

In one hand she holds a pot of strong smelling, thick goop. In the other a small glass jar, top screwed on tightly and glowing softly with magic. A dark blue spider, barely larger than the nail on his little finger, scuttles along the glass, trying to find purchase.

“I thought you told Snow to destroy it.” There’s a question there - this thing, this dangerous thing she was so adamant not hurt anyone else - is kept alive in her care.

She eyes it carefully, curiously, and he thinks he sees the ghost of a smile on her lips before she tilts the jar and the creature tumbles to the lid. It hits whatever magic she’s set there and seizes, its legs curling up like it’s been shocked. When she rights the jar, the creature is still. Vanquished.

“I did,” she tells him, setting the jar carefully on the end of the sofa before she sits next to Roland. “But the venom is not without its uses, and it’s not as though this land provides a steady supply. **They** should destroy it. **I** prefer it dead and captive.” She reaches for the boy’s arm, dips her fingers into the pot of goo and slathers some right onto the open wound.

Roland lets out a scream so blood-curdling that Robin almost yanks Regina away from him, but her own face scrunches miserably, then sets resolutely, and he knows, he knows, that she wouldn’t hurt him without cause. She spreads another dollop over his wound, all the way up past his wrist, dips into the pot again and slathers it down to his fingertips.

He screams and screams, and Robin cannot bear the sound of it. It rips at something primal in him and he has to ball his fists and squeeze his eyes shut, and let her tend to him, because he cannot be within arms’ reach of his boy and keep from stopping whatever is causing this fresh pain. And then all of a sudden Roland settles. He gulps in hungry breaths and lets out little whimpers, but it’s nothing compared to the way he’s cried until now. Robin’s ears ring with the sudden quiet of the room.

Regina wipes her hand on the fabric over her thigh, then brushes now-sweaty curls off Roland’s brow. “There,” she mutters soothingly. “That’s better now, hmm?”

Roland nods, and looks pitifully at his father. “Papa,” he whines, and Robin makes to go to him, but Regina rises in front of him and shakes her head.

“Finishing checking yourself,” she orders. “There could be more than one.”

Robin nods, tells his boy he’ll be there in a moment, he swears, then asks Regina, “What is that?” nodding toward the pot she still holds. The smell is pervasive, but not unpleasant. Like pine or eucalyptus, or… something familiar and yet not. But healing. It smells like a healer’s hut. He’d expected an antidote to be less pleasant.

“Just a salve,” she tells him, looking at it herself now. “It helps numb the pain, slows the poison. The antidote takes some time to brew, and I couldn’t bear him in pain for that long.”

It’s a quiet admission, a tender one, and he can’t help lifting his hand toward her cheek. She ducks away just as his fingers brush her skin, scooping up the jar with the spider in it and heading back toward her vault, muttering something about needing to start on the antidote.

Robin sets about making sure the creature she’s even now tucking away amongst the rest of her dark arsenal was the only one of its kind to travel back with them.


	3. Chapter 3

Long minutes pass in near silence. If she strains, she can hear Robin muttering soothingly to Roland, and the potion she’s brewing is not without its own quiet sounds – the clink of glass bottles being shuffled, the soft pop of a loosened cork, the hiss of elements mixing together. But overall, it’s quiet, and Regina finds it soothing.

There’s a book propped open in front of her, the recipe for the antidote a worn, familiar sight. She barely needs the instruction, but it’s been years since she’s had reason for the brew, and she’d be loathe to miss a step and have to start again. She’s perilously low on broad root and spiny nettle, is down to her last few ounces of healing waters, and none of these are ingredients she can replenish without a portal.

So she relishes the quiet, focuses on fulfilling each step perfectly, and is very, very careful not to think too hard on what has gotten them all here in the first place.

Marian.

Back.

With him.

She has no doubt that Marian spoke the truth when she said she’d been rescued from Regina’s own dungeons – her deadly travel companion was not uncommon down there – although she has no memory of ever detaining the wife of Robin of Locksley . Marian is lucky, she thinks, that she wasn’t bitten sooner. Lucky. Regina scoffs quietly, then redoubles her focus on the potion.

She spares one last thought for Marian’s good fortune: Of course the stars had seen fit to spare her until she landed here - if she’d died, Regina would have been allowed to be happy. And she’s increasingly sure that is not a fate she’s ever been destined for.

She’s nearly completed the first phase of the antidote - it is administered in three doses, each different than the last - when Robin wanders into her crypt. She ignores him, or tries to, anyway, but she can’t help following his movements in her periphery. He’s peering at the items on the shelves, mildly curious. He walks closer, picks up the jar with the dead spider, looks hard at it. Regina drops a final ingredient into the chalice, then steps back. The cup smokes and sizzles, its odor acrid and sour.

“I assume he was the only one?” she questions, nodding toward the spider.

“Aye,” he confirms, setting the thing back down. “That salve worked wonders; Roland’s asleep.” She’s glad for that, a few minutes’ rest will do the boy good. She corks bottles and caps jars, and nearly misses the way Robin reaches for the chalice. “Is it ready?”

She stays his hand a few inches shy and shakes her head. “Not yet. It brews for an hour, and then I have to start on the next dose. He takes the second an hour after the first, and a third, three hours after that.” Regina looks at the chalice, thinks of the many she’s seen claw their way through the healing, and her heart breaks for the little boy who will surely remember this as one of the most miserable nights of his life. “He may take some convincing,” she warns Robin quietly.

He looks pained, like he can read on her face what is coming, and she supposes he can, because she’s never been adept at hiding from him. “Unpleasant?” he asks, and she nods.

“The first dose…” She shakes her head softly, frowns. “It… burns. Races through the veins like lightning. It burns the poison away, chases it out the way it came.” She stares at the chalice, blinks away the images of grown men gritting their teeth at the agony. “He’ll bleed.” She clears her throat quietly. “His hand will bleed. The first dose flushes the system. It will be painful.”

He lets out a shaky breath next to her, and she doesn’t have to see his face to know his fear, she can hear it all in his voice as he asks, “And the second?”

Regina turns to him and forces a smile, reaches for his fingers and squeezes. “The second heals the first. He’ll be cold. Freezing,” she admits. Knows it will be chattering teeth and visible breath and begging for more blankets. “But not in pain, per se. Uncomfortable, he won’t like it. But it won’t be agony.”

Robin’s fingers are gripping hers so tightly it hurts, but she doesn’t try to let go. His eyes are on her, pleading, desperate, as he questions, “Do I even want to know the third?”

Regina lifts her free hand to his cheek, gives him a reassuring smile - this one genuine. This time, she has good news. “The third rights him,” she promises. “Warms the chill, heals him completely. He’ll be tired, but fine.”

Robin nods, drops her hands, scrubs his own over his face and sighs. When he speaks to her, it’s through his fingers. “I don’t suppose there’s any way we could skip straight to that last one?”

She can tell by the way he says it that he already knows the answer.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she means it, genuinely. “The best we could hope for is finding some way to lessen his pain, but even that…” Regina shakes her head, mentally flips through dozens of curses and potions. She can’t think of a single one to numb him that both requires ingredients she has access to, and will blend safely with what Roland needs to live. “Mixing potions can be dangerous. Maybe a sleeping curse, but even then I can’t guarantee he wouldn’t feel it, and there are repercussions…” She thinks of Henry’s arm, covered with painful blisters, the terror he’d startled awake with, and she knows a single night of misery is not worth months or years of returning to fire and pain.

Robin snorts a humorless laugh, says to her, “Like eternal sleep?”

Regina rolls her eyes, can’t help it – as if she’d curse the boy for eternity without a way to release him. “Emma pulled Henry from one. A parent’s love is sufficient to break its hold. But there are lasting side-effects, and I can’t guarantee he wouldn’t still feel everything.”

“But he’d be asleep?”

“Trapped,” Regina corrects. “And alone.”

Robin shakes his head vehemently. “Out of the question, absolutely not.”

She holds up a hand to silence him. “I agree,” she assures. “We’ll just have to help him through it.”


End file.
